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While Joe Biden was meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington, DC, on Thursday as part of the latest NATO summit to discuss ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, his presidential rival Donald Trump was hosting Hungary’s Kremlin-friendly authoritarian leader Viktor Orban at his home in Florida.
Orban branded his visit “peace mission 5.0” in a tweet, posting a picture of himself posing beside the American at Mar-a-Lago as both men grinned and made the thumbs-up sign.
“We discussed ways to make peace,” the Hungarian prime minister wrote. “The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it!”
Trump replied to that with a message of his own that read: “There must be PEACE, and quickly. Too many people have died in a war that should never have started!”
The presumptive presidential nominee has repeatedly claimed that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his western neighbour state in February 2022 would never have happened if he had remained in power, promising to resolve the conflict quickly should he win back the White House while also expressing confidence he can secure the release of imprisoned American journalist Evan Gershkovich with minimal diplomatic fuss.
Before heading south for his latest reunion with Trump in Palm Beach, Orban attended the DC summit as his country currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, although the PM is something of an outlier on the issue of Ukraine, given his friendly relations with Putin, opposition to supplying Kyiv with weapons and rejection of sanctions against Moscow.
Orban met Putin in person in Moscow on July 5, just three days before brutal Russian air strikes hit a children’s hospital, but did not sit down for bilateral talks with Biden at the summit, having endured an inevitably frosty relationship with the Democrat given their opposing positions on the war.
That was unlikely to ease after the Hungarian told German media earlier this week that he believed a Trump victory in November’s US presidential election would be “good for the world politics” and might provide an end to the deadlock in Ukraine, commenting: “I think new leadership will provide new chances.”
Last month, Trump’s eldest son traveled to Hungary, where he also met with Orban and gave a talk entitled “The World According to Donald Trump Jr.”
Orban was last at former president Trump’s home in March, after which he came away claiming his “good friend” would not give “a penny” to Ukraine if he returned to the Oval Office and posted on X: “We need leaders in the world who are respected and can bring peace. He is one of them! Come back and bring us peace, Mr President.”
Trump returned the favor by sending a short video message to the Hungarian leg of the Conservative Political Action Conference in April in which he called Orban “a great man” and said he was “honoured to address so many patriots in Hungary... proudly fighting on the front lines of the battle to rescue western civilisation.
“Together we’re engaged in an epic struggle to liberate our nations from all of the sinister forces who want to destroy them.”
Responding to news of the latest Trump-Orban meeting, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said, pointedly, on Thursday: “The US position, the Biden administration position is: Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.
“So whatever adventurism is being undertaken without Ukrainians’ consent or support is not something that’s consistent with our policy or the policy of the United States.”
Trump’s friendship with Orban was explained to The Independent in March by Robert Benson, a senior policy analyst with the Center for American Progress, who said the two men were bonded “because they see themselves in a civilizational battle”, which is “steeped in anti-immigrant xenophobia, in right-wing nationalism, and in tropes about the nation-state”.
Kim Scheppele, Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, said, more bluntly, that the two self-styled “strongmen” recognized a kinship in one another because they are both “just opportunistic, transactionalists looking to cut a deal whenever it happen.”
Former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who also met with Putin in Moscow earlier this year, is another American right-winger in thrall to Orban and released a documentary in 2022 in which he naively presented Hungary as a model conservative state under the latter’s iron grip.
